Insomnia: Twenty-Six Adventures After Dark

by Leon Lin

2023
Surreal, Humor
Twine

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Review

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Branching gameplay of goofy stories, May 14, 2023
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This game is almost a pure 'time cave', a style of game structure that was popular with a lot of paper CYOA books. Basically every choice branches, with each branch having a different ending. I say it's almost a time cave, since some paths end up recombining later on, but there's not a lot of state tracking in the story itself.

The main drawbacks of such a story are a lack of coherence in the storyline and boring repetition of early material. This story addresses the first by being wacky and nonsensical (so incoherence is a plus) and the second by adding a 'checkpoint' system once you find enough endings, of which I found all 26.

I'm usually not impressed by zany humor but I genuinely found this game funny. It reminded me of Simpsons humor a bit. I've seen that it fell flat for some other reviewers, but humor, especially surreal humor, is so subjective that you're always going to have enjoyers and disenjoyers. I liked this enough to play through all endings.

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